


On Heroes

by dimircharmer



Category: Dragon Age, Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, Heroes, Storytelling, this is hands down the weirdest story I've ever written
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-14
Updated: 2015-10-14
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:41:59
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,676
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5001604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Heroes are hitting Thedas like meteors now, one a decade, and each of them leaves gaping holes in their wake. Not in the world, Varric thinks, but for those who follow after. </p><p>He and Leliana have both been through this once before already.</p><p>*<br/>Varric reflects on heroes, and on what exactly it means to be caught in their wake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On Heroes

**Author's Note:**

> With apologies to the essay I should have been writing while I was writing this fic.

Leliana, Varric knows, operates in waves. Once a bard, then a chantry sister, then a spymaster again, and now coming back around to become the Divine by year's end. Each state higher and greater than the last, cresting above where she was before, and in each you are unable to see the valleys for the peaks. Varric has never been anything but Varric, never a title, simply descriptions. He writes, sometimes, and organizes a spy ring, poorly, and gets drunk with his friends, whenever he can find any that are still alive in his general vicinity. He has never been Sister Nightingale or Divine Victoria, he is simply Varric Tethras, relevant job description. Leliana has reinvented herself again and again, and somehow Varric has stayed as steady as the stone his parents mourned the loss of when they left Orzammar.

* 

“Varric Tethras” He introduces himself, bowing sardonically “Author and unplanned witness from Kirkwall.”

Leliana smiles, thin as a knife in the dark and twice as deadly, and calls herself the inquisition’s spymaster.

* 

                They are both story tellers, at their heart, is the thing. Varric writes, sure, but more than writing, he tells stories. Leliana sings, or at least, sang, but more than that, she tells stories. Both of them are filled to overflowing with soulmates and bitter rivalries and loves lost, all of which are clawing at their throats, bubbling out of them in ink or song. They are full of heroes especially.

*

                “Tell me about the Champion” The Herald asks him, as though that were a simple request.

*

                When people ask him to describe Hawke, Varric never knows where to start. Sometimes he starts the fact that from the moment Hawke arrived in Kirkwall, a smuggler and a mercenary band were vying for her attention. Sometimes he introduces her by saying that she could hold their liquor like a champion, with the sole and terrible exception of brandy, which once gave her a hangover for two and a half straight days. Or maybe with the fact that she didn’t hesitate to challenge the Arishock to a duel, when her friend’s life was on the line. He has not yet started a story of Hawke with the fact that she always put her left boot on before her right, but he is waiting for just the right person to ask, for him to bring that image of the champion to the fore.

                He can never decide to make her a person or a hero, is the problem. He asked Hawke about this, once, asked her how she preferred he introduce her. She laughed and brushed it off, claiming that she was champion by chance; that it could just as easily been Merrill wearing the Champion’s mantle if the Arishok had looked her way when they were first meeting with him in the Qunari encampment by the docks

                Varric accepted the joke, but he thrummed with how wrong she was, how wrong wrong wrong she was, to ever think that there was nothing special about her except for circumstance and luck. He remembered meeting the Arishock clearly, Varric and Fenris and Merrill trailing behind Hawke. He remembers how the massive Qunari leader’s gaze was drawn to sunburnt, scruffy Hawke the first moment her boot came down in the compound. He wasn’t drawn to the heir to ancient lore, or to the business man, used to negotiating, or to the only one of them who was actually fluent in Qunlat, but to Hawke.  She walked through life leaving a wake behind her, thick and powerful as any one of Isabella’s ships. It wasn’t charisma, not entirely. Maker knew she made enemies as fast as friends, and her idea of public speaking usually entailed her yelling the first thing that came to mind and then charging into battle, but she had a _presence_ , like no one else Varric had ever met before, and he threw himself into her wake with abandon.

 *

                “How do you do?” He said to her, twirling his crossbow bolt, and squinting up at her face like he was looking into the sun “Varric Tethras, at your service.”

 *

                How his brother passed her up for the expedition in those early days in Kirkwall was beyond him. Even when she was penniless and dressed in the worst armour that still held itself together, unwashed and hungry, there was an energy to her. Hawke drew the eye. Doing anything from walking through the Lowtown market to fighting bandits, Hawke drew the eye like a whirlpool, never releasing anyone ever caught in her current, and she was unaware of this impact until their very last days in Kirkwall together.

                He remembers once she had collected finger bones- _finger bones!-_ from all over Kirkwall and the coast, following a map that led them to a demon that had been bound in the bowels of the city for nearly eight hundred years. She had rolled her eyes, and said something about this being so _typical_ of Kirkwall. She thought it was the city, not her. She thought that the city had drawn these people together, that she was just one of many instead of the centre point around which they all revolved. She didn’t see herself as a leader, or a focal point, as if all their friends Varric included didn’t have a compass in their hearts that pointed Hawke, true Hawke, unerringly and constant. She acted as though any of them asked each other for help, as though everyone’s first instinct wasn’t to look to Hawke, first and foremost and always.

 *

                “Where are we going? How should I know?” She said on the wounded coast, pants rolled up past her knees and wading in the surf. Apparently, some people could walk from one end of the coast to the other without being attacked, but it had yet to happen to them. “Do I look the leader of this merry band of misfits to you?”

 *

                Whatever spark Hawke had, in the beginning, Kirkwall had blown it into a wildfire. The city itself, Varric was sure, possessed the same spark that infected heroes, and collected elements of disaster and catastrophe, created the environments that precipated heroes as surely as Varric did in any of his stories. Hawke and Kirkwall crashed into each other like titans, and neither left the other whole in their passing. Kirkwall gathered apostates and exiles and power-mad schemers like they were gutter trash caught in eddies against the curb, and Hawke’s frenetic energy swept them from the gutter into the sky, bright as the sun and twice as brilliant.

                And in the aftermath, Varric was blinded. Like stepping out of the sun and into a Darktown tunnel, suddenly Hawke’s brilliance winked out of his life like a candle. Her story, whatever it was, had been concluded, door shut lights off book closed, and Varric was left to flounder. The journey to Haven was… normal. That, more than anything, jarred him. They were beset by bandits on the road, sure, but not one of them was a long-lost relative of any member of the guard, none carried ancient artifacts or sinister notes, and not a one of them asked for anything other than coin.

 *

                “And you were expecting what, precisely?” Cassandra asked him, shaking blood off her sword “Werewolves, perhaps?”

 *

                When the sky exploded, suddenly he fell in line beside a dream walking apostate, a dragon-slaying princess, a chantry spy, and the former knight captain of Kirkwall, and any one of them had the ingredients to be a hero and all he could think was how wrong wrong _wrong_ it all felt. And then the Herald woke up. Cassandra dragged her up the mountain in the snow, barely out of chains, and Varric watched her watch the breech.

                There was no steel in her eyes, no resignation, no despair (those would all come later) just incomprehension. Still, as Varric looked at her the hair on the back of his neck stood up, like there was lightning in the air. But she led them, almost without meaning to, and they slotted into place around her as easily as anyone always had around Hawke. There was no menagerie of people like this without a figure like that, bright as the sun and twice as heavy, pulling them into relentless orbit around her. She asks him, eventually, whether he believes Andraste really sent her, and he says, without a shred of doubt in his cynical and whisky-soaked heart, that he does.

 *

                “It was the divine, Varric.” She tells him, eyes full of understanding “The Divine was behind me in the breech, she’s the one who pushed me out.”

 *

                He can’t quite believe her. That the Maker’s Bride interfered directly does not seem out of the realm of possibility, and the more he thinks about it, the more he thinks about The Herald, and Hawke and The Hero of Ferden, the more he concludes that Andraste herself was a hero who simply burned so brightly that even the maker took notice. That She would do the same for another hero does not seem so strange to him, anymore.

The rest of them fall into orbit around the Herald, and later around the Inquisitor, and Varric wonders what kind of life she would have led if the sky hadn’t been torn open, if she would have found a Kirkwall of her own.

 *

“Home sweet dump” Hawke said, propping her feet on his table at the Hanged Man. She is newly in the Champion’s Mantle, and Varric is finding it harder and harder to picture her in anything else. “Kirkwall’s a garbage city, but it’s _my_ garbage city now. No-one dirties it up but me.”

 *

                Heroes are hitting Thedas like meteors now, one a decade, and each of them leaves gaping holes in their wake. Not for the world, he thinks. As far as most people know, the book shuts, the song fades out and the world returns to normal. But for those who followed in their wake, for those whose tales are footnotes and accessories to the heroes of the age, they are left reeling. This is a thing that Varric and Leliana share.

 *

                “So, Sister.” He asks her, and he knows it's no small favour “Tell me about the Hero of Ferelden.”

 *

                She describes the warden, the Hero of Ferelden (or more succinctly, simply The Hero) as a gale-force wind, a hurricane. Blowing through an area relentlessly, leaving it totally transformed in after it’s passing, picking up bits of lives and debris and depositing them miles and miles away. Leliana told him of her time in Lothering, of the way the Hero of Ferelden picked her up not a week after the Hawkes left, and Varric suddenly knows with absolute certainty, sure as he knows after he’s released a bolt and knows its flying true, that Hawke could have been the Hero of Ferelden.

He knows, when she says that, he knows in his bones that the bonfire-wild, tidal force of Hawke’s heroic aura could have been refined into the keen-edged blade that the Hero of Ferelden wielded. He knows also, that the Hero of Ferelden could have washed up in Kirkwall in Hawke’s place just as easily, and become every bit the blunt-force instrument of influence and charisma as Hawke was. Hawke was shaped by Kirkwall’s inexplicable draw of the unique and unusual, of the people that gathered in wait for her in the gutters and mountains of the city. The Warden was shaped instead by the raw desperation and frantic chaos of the blight, by civil war and the knowledge that failure would mean doom upon on the world. He knows that if either of them attended the conclave, they would have walked out of the breech with Andraste behind them and Her mark on their hand and they would have looked at the hole in the sky and fixed it.

 *

“It could have been anyone, who walked in on the divine” The Inquisitor insists. “There’s nothing special about me.”

 *

And sure, each of them are shaped by circumstance, but where pressure and heat turned them into gemstones, it turns regular people to ash. In order to be shaped by circumstance, you need to be a block of marble in the first place. The carving has left every one of the heros raw and bleeding, but they have been turned into masterpieces, each one of them worth preserving. You need to see the stairs to be able to rise to the occasion, and that's what Heroes, capital H Heroes, do.

The rest of them, Varric thinks, fight for special interest researchers and cameo apperences, for two lines in a history textbook. Long after any of them are people, The Warden and The Champion and The Inquisitor will still be Heroes, and Varric has the distinct impression that he was only part of either life in order to write the story down. He and Leliana both still breathe speeches and lyrical metre, inhaling facts and exhaling verse.

 *

“It’s a gift, you know, your storytelling; to be able to make them up.” Merrill says to him, palms dripping blood in front of her mirror “Stories are all we have left, the Dalish, it’s my job to Keep them.”

 *

 Varric bleeds ink and Leliana bruises in notes and chords, both of them narrative down to their bones. His heart is surely wrapped in epilogues and denouements, to keep safe until the very last, he is only keeping them there until they can be put to use. He and Leliana were called as surely as the heroes of the age were. Their job is not to do, as the Heroes do, but to bear witness. It’s the hardest thing he’s ever done.  (He wonders if he ever would have written without Hawke, if without a Hero to record he ever would have written his crime serials or his penny dreadfuls, if those were just practice for immortalizing the Tale of The Champion).

 *

“A copy for my muse” He said, letting a copy of The Tale of the Champion fall heavily on the bedside table next to Hawke. She groaned herself awake, and glared at him with hair in her face and sleep in her eyes.

“You’re lucky you’re my favourite Dwarf” She said. “And also that your cover artist made me look like I could win an arm-wrestle against Aveline.”

 *

Lelianna refused to write ballads of the Hero of Ferelden, after the Blight, and Varric understands. She stayed in the Rookery throughout the whole of the Inquisition, Lady Nightingale among the Ravens, and refuses to sing. It is not just that the hero died, at the top of the tower slaying the Archdemon, though that is part of it. It is that Leliana understood, long before Varric ever did, what it would mean to lose a hero. Lilianna survived a hurricane, and was put down wind-swept and haggard on the other side, and all anyone asked her was how bright the lightning was. Leliana found herself on the other side of the blight with empty sails and becalmed sea, and set herself to rights again.

Whatever course she had been on before the Blight, the Warden blew her off course, and the Inquisitor was pulling her into another one again, just as she had righted herself. The magic of heroes, their power, is that you didn’t notice until years afterward. He and Leliana though, they’ve done this before. He knows this tune, he’s written this book, and no matter how strong the orbit of the Inquisitor, he knows that someday this tale will end too. He’s not sure if it’s going to be a triumph or a tragedy, yet, but the fact that Leliana and him have both been pulled here to record it worries him more than he cares to admit. He knows as much as anyone that you can't leave until the epilogue. 

 *

“Hey Nightingale” He says to her, leaning over the edge of her desk. “I want your advice on a story.”

*

**Author's Note:**

> Boy, that was a weird one. It occurred to me that Leliana and Varric are the two real storytellers in the DA cast, and that they both make major appearances in two different games, so this was born. Can you imagine, having to go through that shit twice in a lifetime?


End file.
